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Red Ellen The Life of Ellen Wilkinson, Socialist, Feminist, Internationalist
Laura Beers
Cambridge (Massachusetts): Harvard University Press, 2016 Hardcover. viii+532 p. ISBN 978-0674971523. $29.95/£21.95
Reviewed by Deborah Mutch De Montfort University, Leicester
Ellen Wilkinson’s historical star is in the ascendant. Hot on the heels of 2015’s short biography by Paula Bartley, through Pluto Press, comes Laura Beer’s intricately researched book. Where Bartley’s excellent biography might act as an introduction (spanning only 153 pages) Beers fills her 532 pages with the detail and insight that a longer publication allows. And with the long and full political life Wilkinson led, those pages are packed with the many events and actions in the life of this astonishing female politician and campaigner. One wonders, when opening a biography and reading on the second page that ‘Ellen’s younger brother Harold destroyed her personal papers in a huge bonfire following his sister’s death’ [2] just what will fill those many following pages. Taking what might have been an insoluble problem for the biographer, the author turns this gap to an advantage and presents Wilkinson as the historical figure she was: working with Winston Churchill during the British wartime government; discussing the Nazi threat to Jews with Albert Einstein; meeting with the imprisoned, hunger-striking Mahatma Gandhi to discuss equality and Indian free trade; attending a Comintern conference in Russia and hearing the speeches of Lenin and Leon Trotsky. By writing ‘a story of the networks through which Ellen moved during her brief but intense career,’ [2] Beers uses that enforced distance from the person to draw back and show the wider perspective of Wilkinson and the history through which she moved. Born in 1891 to working-class parents and brought up in working-class Ardwick, Manchester, Ellen’s decisive nature was already showing when she went on ‘strike’ at school because ‘I decided I didn’t like sums, and wasn’t going to do any’ [15]. Her disinclination for mathematics aside, Ellen’s experience at school showed a remarkable intelligence as she won scholarships to Ardwick Higher Elementary Grade School and then Stretford Road girls’ secondary school. From there she progressed to a position as pupil-teacher and it was here that she was chosen to take the role of a socialist candidate in a mock election. She read Robert Blatchford’s socialist polemics, Britain for the British and Merrie England, and ‘went into that election an ardent, in fact a flaming socialist’ [22]. She joined the Independent Labour Party and at university, achieved by winning another scholarship, joined the Manchester Society for Women’s Suffrage (MSWS), the Manchester University Fabian Society and the University Socialist Federation, in which she held the position of woman secretary. She took a position as assistant organizer with the MSWS, a job she held after the MSWS became part of the Women’s International League for Peace during World War One. She worked for the Amalgamated Union of Co-operative Employees (AUCE) between 1915 and 1924 until she was elected to parliament and returned to the role between 1931 and 1935 after losing her seat, even though AUCE had amalgamated with the Warehouse Workers Union to form the National Union of Distributive and Allied Workers (NUDAW). After her re-election to parliament in 1935 she was elected to the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee (NEC), first as vice chair and then chair, was Minister for Education in the 1945 Labour government and a founding member of UNESCO. She remained an MP for the Labour Party until her death in 1947. Her hectic work schedule within Britain, including her most famous campaign organizing, promoting and occasionally joining the Jarrow Crusade marchers in 1936, did not prevent her from taking her enthusiasm for equality and social justice beyond the British Isles. She carried out lecturing tours for women’s societies in North America, spoke to striking factory workers in the USA during the Great Depression, visited India to see for herself the consequences of imperialism, travelled to Germany to witness the rising of fascism and Spain in support of the Republican government against Franco’s fascism. She worked with women’s campaigners and socialists from across the globe in a truly international attempt to bring about a better world. With such wide-ranging interests and campaigns it is not surprising that there were conflicts of interest at points. Beers guides the reader through Ellen’s choices and crossroads, from putting her convictions before her political ambition by withdrawing her name from the ballot for the Labour Party’s NEC after voting against the party’s decision to impose sanctions on Italy for the invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 to writing for and serializing her novels in the Conservative Daily Express. Beers shows us the points at which Ellen chooses the greater cause over party or political ideology, for instance recognizing fascism as more important than party politics and working with Liberals and Tories to ensure parliament did all it could to destroy it, and sharing a stage in Manchester Town Hall with Liberal Lady Horsley and Conservative Lady Acland for the Women’s Peace Crusade in 1929 [218]. She was simultaneously a woman who worked for the public good and a divisive figure, admired by many but also attacked by her opponents, including physically when ‘a group of fur coated women in Middlesborough … hammered me with the steel frame of their handbags’ [254-255] during her campaign in Jarrow. She clashed with Wright Robinson when working together in NUDAW, with Herbert Morrison over funding to education, and with the Labour Party itself over the Jarrow Crusades. To include such a broad perspective on the busy political life of Ellen Wilkinson means that it would be necessary to omit other aspects of the woman’s life, so the lack of personal detail enables Beers to bring a clear focus on Wilkinson’s working life. There are, though, areas on what is available to the researcher that this reader would have welcomed further details, or at least some authorial consideration. Why, for instance, did Wright Robinson take against Ellen so strongly? What might have caused him to accuse Ellen of ‘arrang[ing] a crisis to get her own way’ [70]? Was there nothing in Manchester’s Wright Robinson collection that even hinted at this animosity? I would also have welcomed some further discussion on the moral complexities of Wilkinson’s life and choices. While Beers has provided an immensely detailed and well-researched account of Wilkinson’s life as a politician and activist, the relationship between that political and activist life and what is known of her personal life remains unaddressed and, more importantly, unchallenged. The subtitle to the biography sets her socialism and internationalism with her feminism and the reader is kept aware that these three aspects of Wilkinson’s life run equally and concurrently but the reader is also left wondering how this might have been justified to herself. For a woman who prided herself on her work to bring equality and social justice to all women to embark on a series of long-lasting affairs with married men it does not appear that she practiced what she preached. I understand that the rumors surrounding her relationship with John Jagger and Otto Katz might have been unfounded gossip but, although there is no firm proof of her affair with Herbert Morrison, it was widely accepted that this happened and her affair with Frank Horrabin is recorded in his letters to his wife, Winifred. These affairs are presented to the reader without commentary but as plain facts or, in the case of Morrison, almost-verified rumors. We also learn that Wilkinson had the capacity to use her friends as we see when ‘Ellen had her friend [Amy Wilde] follow close behind her all evening so that enthusiastic punters were forced to slap Amy on the back and spare the candidate’ [220] after her re-election to the Middlesborough East seat. The author is not averse to raising assumptions on Wilkinson’s possible emotional responses to events: for instance, we read that criticisms of her career as a journalist ‘doubtless took their toll’ [241] when she continued to work for Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express after she lost her seat in 1931. These glaring inconsistencies – her affairs and her feminism, her journalism and her socialism – are passed over with little or no comment by Beers on what looks to the reader, less immersed in Wilkinson’s life than the author, as hypocrisy. Were there no single men in her life? No other papers to write for? At these points it seems almost as if the author shies away from Wilkinson’s actions in order to present a slightly air-brushed version of this complex – and sometimes contradictory – woman. Nevertheless, Laura Beers gives us the best and most comprehensive account of Ellen Wilkinson to date. Wilkinson’s boundless energy and enthusiasm for her work might have been described by her personal secretary as ‘a bit slap-dash’ and her attentions ‘variously dispersed’ but ‘no one could doubt her sincerity’ [351]. Even the author admits that: ‘It is tempting to view Ellen as an enthusiast who jumped on every far-left bandwagon’ [352] in the early 1930s, but Ellen Wilkinson was at the heart of many of the major events and campaigns across the first half of the twentieth century and Beers’ book reinstates her position in history for the twenty-first-century reader.
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